


Queen of Nothing

by Mercy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Big Bang Challenge, Case Fic, Community: deancasbigbang, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge, Deanna Winchester - Freeform, F/M, Female Dean Winchester, First Time, Genderswap, Human Castiel, Podfic Available, Post Season/Series 05, Resolved Sexual Tension, Roadtrip, always-a-girl!Dean, deancasbigbang 2012, girl!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercy/pseuds/Mercy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deanna couldn't make it work with Lisa and left with Cas when he showed up in Indiana. Now she's got a thousand empty spaces where Sam should be and Cas has a thousand more where Heaven should be, but the job is the job and the road is the road and they're in it together.</p><p>Podfic by exmanhater now available <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/760012">here</a>!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queen of Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Mini bang for deancasbigbang 2012. 
> 
> AWESOME ART by angrydumpling/scarsaw available here: http://angrydumpling.livejournal.com/1689.html
> 
> Masterpost/long-winded author notes available here: http://thirstyrobot.livejournal.com/124000.html
> 
> Huge thanks to the_reverand, triedunture, and brokentoy for beta help and general support! Any failings are my own.

Deanna waits at BWI baggage claim in the stupid itchy power-bitch suit she wears to match her fake badges. For all that her stylish-yet-sensible low-heeled pumps are supposed to be comfortable, she's walked enough of the terminal and stood here long enough that the balls of her feet are burning against three-for-a-dollar Walgreens pantyhose and ergonomic insoles and she has to shift her weight from foot to foot for relief. Also, she has the mother of all wedgies, which is just going to have to stay where it is until the bag she's waiting for shows up. Bobby heard from Rufus heard from a long line of somebodies that it's going to contain a hex-box containing one motherfucker of a cursed amulet that needs to not go home with the dude who bought it at an auction in New York, where it got sold before anybody else could get their hands on it. All she's got to go on is a blurry security camera photo from LaGuardia of a fat guy and a wheeled suitcase that is _probably_ red. She's praying he'll get hung up getting off the plane and she can just walk out of here with the bag without going through all the Air Marshal bullshit and having to make a scene. She's not actually praying, of course. If she were praying, she'd be praying for her feet not to spontaneously fucking combust before she can get the shoes off.

It's maybe time for new Fed shoes. She watches flight numbers pop up on the information screens and remembers when she bought these and how Sam made fun of her for days on end, because after nearly breaking her ankle in a pair of Pay-Less stilettos in a fight with a vengeful ghost with the worst sense of timing in history, she'd said, 'Fuck this, Mary Ann Turner and her low introductory APR are buying my ass some shoes that won't get me killed.' The ugly-ass things cost eighty bucks on clearance and they came from Naturalizer in the Cherry Hill, New Jersey mall and afterward Sam gave her crap for so long that even Deanna started saying, 'Where's my grandma shoes?' when it was time to suit up for official-type appearances.

She laughs quietly when she thinks of Sam buying her a 'Sheriff Grandma' badge at a haunted gift shop in Georgia and a 'Granny's Ride' license plate holder from a Virginia truck stop mysteriously appearing on the Impala. Then she thinks of pulling Sam's giant puppy-eyed ass out of a thousand and one fires and his giant moosey hands pulling her out of a thousand and one more and how that's never going to happen again because Sammy's down there in that cage and there's not a thing in creation that has both the power and the willingness to get him out of there, and the Arriving Flights screen goes blurry.

"They wouldn't let me take my wine on the plane," says the squat elderly woman in a visor and a Statue of Liberty t-shirt who's walked up next to her. "I never like to check any bags, ever since they lost my granddaughter's suitcase. We never did see it again. And I said to her, I said Janie, I'll bet you money somebody just picked up the durn thing and walked off with it."

"Uh-huh," Deanna says, blinking the sting out of her eyes, tunes out the actual grandma and her suitcase story that just gets longer and longer and watches bags start to creak their way down the belt. The first red bag that comes down has the right last name on it and she rolls it away with the old lady still talking and limps her way to the inconspicuous rental car that's waiting for her in short-term because airports have cameras fucking everywhere. The Impala's questionably safe probably somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania by now and the beige Camry with the creepily silent pushbutton ignition will only trace back to Christine Taylor's MasterCard and a nondescript businesswoman on some grainy cameras with her hair hiding most of her face. And if they see her throwing her shoes into the trunk along with the suitcase, it doesn't really matter.

*

There's nothing Deanna hates more these days than an empty motel room. Maybe empty passenger seats, empty other sides of diner tables. Empty spaces that ought to have Sams in them and she doesn't think she'll ever get used to it. She didn't even get used to it in the Stanford years, and Sam's a lot farther away now than California. It's the worst when she's alone in a motel room that doesn't have anybody bitching and researching, and, hell, right now she'd even take him strung out on demon blood and creeping her right the fuck out because at least he'd be there. She broke the apple-pie half of her promise to him months ago because she was too screwed up and was making Lisa miserable and she's nobody's damn stepmother, no matter how much she wants to want that, and no matter how much Lisa might have wanted to try, there was also some part of her that wanted Ben to have a _dad_. Deanna would break the other half of the promise if she could, the half where she swore to Sam she'd leave him down there for an eternity of fuck-knows-what that Alistair couldn't come up with in his wildest hellfirey dreams, and damned if she didn't try to go back on her word, but she couldn't, can't. So Sam's still in the cage, and she's got empty rooms and cars and tables.

She's also got Cas, who fills a space but not _the_ space. He fills his own space, not the Sam-space, does awesome with the researching and sometimes hilariously (and sometimes heartbreakingly) okay with the bitching, fills seats and rooms and has her back, but it's not the same. At least he knows it and at least he understands that she's never going to be _not_ screwed-up, because he's screwed-up too. He's also currently two states away, maybe a little less, or should be by now, so there being a second bed without an owner makes the room even emptier. Just Deanna and a hex-box and some beer, a 12-pack because she's not kidding herself. The suitcase is probably on its way back to the airport, slipped in among the luggage leaving on the last shuttle and with any luck leaving the blame for the missing Very Expensive and Very Cursed Thing on the shoulders of the TSA because the internet is really helpful if you need to mock up one of those 'your bag has been inspected' notices. She stayed here specifically to use the airport shuttle for getting rid of the bag, and places with airport shuttles don't tend to have Magic Fingers, so Deanna's stuck with rubbing the burn out of her own feet after she peels off the hose straight into the wastebasket.

Three beers down she's still staring at the same section of (Sam's) laptop screen with the scan Cas emailed from Maine, an old book's details on the amulet. It's just a legend about the witch who made it and its supposed powers, nothing about how to destroy it, and before she started glazing over it was reading like a gruesome fairy tale. Wronged woman, evil scary gift jewelry to asshole ex, revenge blah blah, cheaters dying messy blah blah. Deanna and Cas had split up because someone needed to gank the witch (still hanging around the same town two hundred years later, go figure) and someone needed to chase the amulet before anyone else got their hands on it. She hasn't heard from Cas since a text saying he was alive and the witch wasn't and he was on his way to Maryland, but she knows how he drives and that he'll be later than he thinks because he won't time it assuming he'll need sleep. He doesn't always, but whatever mojo he's got left has been slowly but steadily draining away. Deanna ignores it a little less than Cas does, but they both know it's happening. There's probably some pretty bad shit going down in Heaven but Cas can't get back there to find out, hasn't been able to ever since he winged down into Lisa's back yard while Deanna was raking leaves. She'd be lying if she said leaving Lisa didn't have something to do with Cas being suddenly there and so lost and so frustrated, so she does her best not to say anything about it at all. Like about how he's getting less charmingly inept with technology, for example, like he knows he's going to need it. 

"I should be there in three hours," Cas says when she finally gives up not calling because she's out of things to say to Bobby and there's nothing on TV and it's too goddamn quiet.

Deanna can hear road noise, a semi's horn sounding, and that sound will never not send a chill up her spine. " _Tell_ me you're not driving right now."

"You do it all the time, Dee," Cas grumbles absently, and Deanna flinches and feels a knot in her throat because only Sam ever used to call her that. Cas usually remembers not to, and he does now after the fact. "I'm sorry," he says, and she can hear the strain and fatigue in his voice.

"Yeah, well, you can multitask behind the wheel when you've been driving for sixteen years too." It feels thick in her mouth and hollow in her head and doesn't come out jokey-bitchy like she meant it to, but Cas doesn't call her on it.

"I thought I shouldn't lose any more time by stopping again. I was forced to rest for a few hours." He admits that like someone else might say they've wet their pants.

"It's okay. Get here when you get here. I'd rather have you in one piece."

"I'll see you in three hours." Cas hangs up without a goodbye because he still hasn't quite gotten the hang of that.

Deanna exchanges the rest of the Fed costume for a long hot shower and then for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans that _damn_ , are going to need washing pretty soon. She orders a pizza, mostly so that it can be left in the mini-fridge in case Cas is hungry and doesn't want to admit it, but she eats a couple of slices out of habit even though she doesn't really feel like it. She tries to look at the amulet stuff again so Cas won't give her that disapproving-teacher look for admitting she hasn't read it, but she ends up looking at the pictures on Sam's hard drive, mostly college stuff with Sam far away and happy, and falls asleep after a few moments of closing her eyes against a welling sting in them.

When she wakes up, it's with a start, and there's Cas standing over her gripping her wrist against the knife she's got pointed at him. She lets her hand go slack and feels a smile creeping onto her face. "Hey." She doesn't ask how he got in here, whether he picked the lock or mojo'd the door or told the desk she was his wife. "So you're in one piece, how's my baby?"

"Unscathed," Cas says. She lets him take the knife from her and put it back under the pillow.

"I got pizza if you want any."

Cas is still close, smells like the Impala's leather, like home. He shakes his head. "I don't need it."

Deanna rolls onto her back and pokes him in the shoulder. "I said want, asshole, which you better because I got green peppers on half and you know those give me the shits." This is how it is, getting Cas to eat. She's not sure how often he needs to, but she's half afraid he'll just keel over from malnutrition or get rickets or scurvy or something if he's not _try this, it's awesome_ 'd into chewing and swallowing.

"Not right now," Cas says, and sits down on edge of her bed to unlace his boots. She nearly laughed at him the first time he got a blister running around in the holy tax accountant shoes, but she didn't because as far as Cas was concerned it might as well have been cancer. They're a still-new pair that match Deanna's floppy weathered worn-in ones, only in a bigger size, and she did laugh when she suggested Cas get cowboy boots like Dr. Sexy and he glared at her and, after some apparent deliberation, gave her the finger. If Cas were Sam, she'd tell him right now that his feet fucking stink, but there is no Sam and stinking feet equals humanity equals things Cas wants to ignore, so she just asks him about the witch and he kicks his (seriously noxious) feet up onto the bed next to her and answers her questions until one or the other of them trails off talking into sleep.

*

Even with the amulet burning a hole in the trunk, they can't get straight back to Bobby's because once they hit Ohio, the _Plain Dealer_ on the racks in every convenience store has nasty headlines about deaths in Elyria and they have to stop. There's a man who died from having every bone in his body broken in a twenty-foot drop down a sidewalk vent, half a dozen assaults in dark alleys, a teacher driven to a psychotic break by her third-graders taunting her. It's not until they find out about the woman whose brain was eaten by spiders that crawled into her ears while she was sleeping and the man whose dick _literally fell off_ that they finally piece together that whatever's doing it is preying on people's worst fears. A businessman gets swarmed to death by killer bees while they're in a restaurant and Deanna's telling Cas she can't _believe_ he's never tried pierogies and pushing a plate toward him. If Sam were here, he'd be looking over his shoulder for clowns. Or maybe the devil.

"It already happened," Deanna says when Cas asks what her biggest fear is, because it is, _was_ , losing Sam, and Cas leans forward and does that half-smile that's actually a frown but stops short of touching her hand and picks up the salt shaker at the last second. "But now, I guess... I don't know." It could be Cas getting sucked back up into heaven, or it could be living a life that doesn't mean jack shit, playing picket fences and pretending there's nothing to fear in the dark until there's grandchildren discussing whether to pull the plug. It's not Hell; it never was, but it could be the parts of her that Hell changed. It could be any of a thousand nightmares, but she can't narrow it down to one. "Maybe that'll make me immune or something." She shrugs and doesn't really believe it. She doesn't ask Cas the question in return because she's pretty sure he might already be living it out in things like hunger and sleep and the fact that he's starting to need a haircut and is stuck down here with her.

The waitress flirts with Cas, which Cas doesn't notice. She's hot enough, a college girl whose nametag says Hailey, and once she hears they're FBI she's full of questions, because she's afraid she'll be next. "My Nana says the town's cursed," she says with wide eyes and a trembling lip. Deanna has to kick Cas under the table when he starts asking what kind of curse and where they can find Hailey's grandma.

"Don't you worry about a thing, hon," Deanna says with her winningest smile, because all they fucking need would be for Hailey to be flipping out enough about bad juju to actually bring _more_ of it into being. "We're gonna figure this out and stop it."

"Why did you kick me?" Cas asks when Hailey's nodded all watery-eyed and given them their check. "If this Nana knows something--"

"Yeah, Granny's worth checking out, but you can't just spout off about rituals in the middle of a lunch rush." Cas has gotten a lot better at not doing things like announcing the existence of demons to small-town sheriffs, better at playing a part when he needs to, but sometimes he's still just a little too angel-literal.

"I apologize," Cas says, more the kind of sorry you say for 'I started the apocalypse' than for 'oops, almost blew our cover,' and Deanna feels like kind of an asshole. Cas seems to have more feelings to hurt than he used to.

"It's okay. You just gotta be more careful. Blondie-bear didn't know anything except she's freaked about what's going down around here and wants to get in your pants."

Cas blinks and licks some sour cream off the side of his hand. "I don't think I want her in my pants." Beat. "That was a joke."

That pulls something loose in Deanna's guts and she can't stop laughing all the way to the parking lot, where Hailey's sitting in her car smoking a cigarette and she smiles at them as they walk by, too much faith and trust behind cheap lipstick.

*

Cas paints extra sigils on the inside of the Impala's trunk to protect the hex-box, symbols he just knows without thinking like he knows a million languages and has a demon encyclopedia in his head. It's kind of awesome how he just looks at her like 'what?' when she's still kind of in awe and trying to catch up with the motions of his hand.

Hailey's grandma doesn't know anything, not really. She's half Erie and thinks the 'curse' is the wrath of her dead relatives for building the Midway Mall on ancestral land, but it wasn't a burial ground or anything and the mall was built in the '60s and the land is only ancestral in the sense that some ancestors used to live there a few centuries ago. She likes Cas a lot, even before he pulls a bunch of Erie history and a couple of phrases out of the angelic wikipedia in his giant brain. Deanna she just glares at, like she can see right through, with brown eyes so dark they look nearly black and it's unnerving. She gives Cas a dreamcatcher when they leave, not one of the crappy mass-produced truck-stop ones but a real one that Deanna can look at and name off all the functions of the crystals and stones caught in the red spiderweb. She knows Cas can too, and he keeps staring at it in his lap with that microscope gaze all the way through Deanna's swearing and multiple U-turns that it takes to get to the mall because the 'Elyria Next 3 Exits' sign off 58 is not only a direction but a description because the place is nothing _but_ exits and whoever built the town doesn't seem to think anyone should actually need to _go_ anywhere in it. She's never asked what Cas dreams about when he sleeps.

The mall is one of those creepy deserted ones with the department stores closed and dark and cleared out, nothing left but a few sad-looking shops selling stuff like Nordic Tracks and sunglasses and wicker furniture, three empty spaces apart from their nearest neighbors. Besides the employees, no one's there but Deanna and Cas, some kids smoking cigarettes around the dry fountain outside the main entrance, and a handful of old people in workout gear using the place as an air-conditioned indoor track.

"Weird place, huh?" Deanna says to the maybe-college-maybe-high-school kid working at the Auntie Anne's, which is the only thing left in the food court besides a dubious-looking Sbarro.

The kid shrugs, runs a hand through his hair and that's probably against health codes, but whatever. "Boring as hell, but I get paid eight bucks an hour to sit around and do my homework." So college kid, probably. Deanna gets the pretzels for free because the guy hasn't even bothered to open the cash register for the day. "They're probably going to taste like ass anyway," the guy says. "I don't even remember the last time we had to order dough."

The pretzels do taste pretty freezer-burnt, but they're okay dipped in the little pots of sauces. Deanna makes Cas try all of them, and he likes the chocolate. "Was that boy flirting with you?" he asks, thankfully without physical air quotes, though Deanna can hear them there anyway.

Deanna shrugs. "Maybe kinda," she says around a mouthful of pretzel and honey mustard. And yeah, she's been known to go for barely-legal, and the kid had the kind of face she wouldn't kick out of bed, but it actually hadn't even occurred to her. "Probably just happy to see somebody who's not old enough to be his grandmother." Cas has a drip of chocolate sauce just below his bottom lip and she reaches out without thinking to brush it away. Cas stares. "You had some, uh." She wipes her finger on a napkin.

She was pretty sure this mall would be a bust, but it's all they've got right now. The EMF has nothing to say for itself until they climb the turned-off escalator and find themselves in front of one of those incense-reeking headshops with tie-dye wall hangings and bongs in the window. The bloodshot-eyed owner introduces himself as 'Bear' and ends up stoned-ranting about being about to get evicted due to not having paid rent on the shop in six months, because of 'the fucking Man, man.'

Bear ends up knocked out and there's a creepy altar in the back room that's nicely flammable. Cas recites something over the flames and slices his palm open while Deanna stands by with a fire extinguisher and waits for his nod. They walk out an emergency exit to the tune of deafening alarms and a rain of sprinklers.

"My worst fear," Cas says back at the motel, his eyes on the cut on his hand that hasn't magically sewn itself back together as Deanna cleans and bandages it, and they both know it's not still there because they haven't broken the spell.

"I know," Deanna says in a near-whisper, and it's only because she's thinking of her mother and skinned knees seven thousand lifetimes ago that she presses her lips to the gauze and tape and accidentally catches a little bit of sweat-salted skin. She imagines running her tongue along the cut itself, seaming it closed.

Cas looks at her with too much feeling for someone who didn't used to show a damn bit of anything, so Deanna tapes off the bandage and lays his hand down and strips off her pantyhose and powerbitch jacket and pulls her itchy Victoria's Secret push-up special out through the arms of her white starched blouse, scratches at the stubble growing up on her legs. She never used to shave until some barbie doll in 8th or 9th grade gave her shit for it and called her a dyke. She'd still rather not, even all these years later, but it's part of blending in for the job, being unremarkable. Nobody remembers too much about a hot lady Fed except that she's a hot lady Fed, as long as she looks the part, and months of leg hair smashed under hose isn't part of the part. She lets her pits do what they want unless they have to look the part too, the rare but nonetheless disturbing times when she has to go out in tight things and flash more than a couple buttons' worth of cleavage to get information. Most guys don't seem to mind, and a guy in Wherever, Nebraska thought it was hot and licked the sweat out of the dark downy hairs. Lisa never minded, stroked manicured-to-look-not-manicured fingers through the should-have-been-bikini-waxed hair on Deanna's upper thighs. Lisa accepted a lot of her, almost all of her, but in the end not quite enough of her. Not the part that can't forget what's out there. Out here.

She knows that Cas knows every cell and follicle. Knows all of her, even the really shitty parts, and he's still here, and that's why she lets go of his hand and gets as far across the room as she can, even though he's staring at his hand like it's betrayed him. Cas doesn't like platitudes any more than she does, and that's all she's got right now, the _it'll be okays_ and the _don't worry about it_ s that she knows are empty bullshit. So she just changes back into her kinda-rank jeans and steps into her boots without bothering with socks and goes and gets some subs from the Mr. Hero down the street. Cas picks the peppers and salami out of his Italian like it's an archaeological dig and the lettuce and tomato shouldn't be disturbed.

He catches her rubbing her feet again, because she _really_ needs new Fed shoes, and lays hands on them that don't do anything but transmit a little extra warmth and a slight tickle. She can see him realize the mojo hasn't worked, see the sigh in his shoulders that he doesn't voice. "One time, we lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania-- which is basically either Philly or Jersey depending which way you go-- for about two months while Dad was trying to take down this complete bitch of a witch," Deanna says, breaking off part of what's left of Cas's sandwich. "I had this Metallica shirt from their first big tour ever, and I lost a bet with this guy because I couldn't eat six of those radioactive-pink pickled eggs, which by the way taste like a demon's asshole. Not that I'd know, but I'm pretty sure they do. So I owed him the shirt and two whiz wits, which I'm ordering but don't actually have any money to pay for, but Sammy's brought the jar of eggs along with him and he's eaten like, ten, and just when I'm about to have to figure out how to pay the sandwich cart guy, Sammy projectile-vomits pink eggs all over bet-dude's shoes. And you've seen his grown-up puppy eyes, but imagine them at twelve when he's all short and awkward. Bet-dude just gets disgusted and walks off but the sandwich guy turns out to have little kids at home so he goes all motherly on Sammy and gives us free food. Well, I got free food. Sammy got free ginger ale."

"What happened to the shirt?" Cas asks, and his thumbs are digging into the arch of Deanna's right foot.

"Eventually got disintegrated by some noxious slime," she says with her eyes closing. This would be better if Sam were here to contradict her on the finer points of the story. It would also be better if the touches to her feet weren't going straight to her groin. It's not the first time she's wondered if that's something that can be detected by angelic spidey-senses, pheromones or whatever, but half the time Cas can't even tell when he's being flirted with, so maybe not. She's sure as hell not going to ask right now. What she does ask is where Cas learned to do this, and hopes he doesn't say a porno. Cas starts in about human physiology and names off muscles and Deanna keeps her eyes closed and feels a smile creep onto her face.

*

Just outside South Bend, Indiana, Bobby calls with a ritual he thinks will kill the amulet. It's a pretty gnarly one, with lamb's blood and the bone of an adulterer. Deanna passes the phone off to Cas and watches him out of the corner of her eye as he takes notes. She notices for the first time that his hair's hanging down over his forehead where it used to stick up, and that maybe his perpetual five o'clock shadow is looking a little more like ten-thirty and it gives her a chilling flash of a Cas that will never exist if she has anything to say about it, one with glazed eyes and no hope. This Cas knows that, how he could have or still could end up (but damn well won't if Deanna has anything to say about it), and still chose this. Chose her, when you get right down to it. She's not sure whether it was to save her from herself or because they're as fucked-up as each other, no more than she's sure whether she would have had the balls to do the same.

The ritual has to be worked at the new moon, which is tomorrow night, and nobody wants them hanging onto the damn thing for another month, so they stop and spend the afternoon searching divorce records and murder trials for a dead cheater. "Just one damn time," Deanna says that night in the cemetery, stomping her foot down onto her shovel to unearth Lou Conley, 1937-1985, "I'd like to see a ritual that calls for candy canes and sunshine."

"Candy canes have no inherent metaphysical powers," Cas says from the other end of the grave. In the light of the Coleman lantern by the headstone, she can see he's sweating. She is too, and these jeans are definitely do-not-pass-go destined for the nearest washing machine. "That was a joke," Cas says, which she knew.

Once good old Lou's minus a few finger bones and Cas has helped pull Deanna back topside (yeah, she gets the symbolism) with soil catching gritty between their palms, he makes a sign in the air and mumbles something, maybe a re-consecration, maybe an apology. Then he blinks and the dirt's back in the grave, grass and all. Deanna's about to say something like 'damn, you couldn't have done the digging for us?' but when she looks over and opens her mouth, Cas is breathing hard and there's blood trickling out of his left nostril. So all she says is, "Hey," and pulls off the mostly-still-clean bandana she's had covering her hair and presses it to his nose. He shuts his eyes and sighs into it, a hot puff of air she can feel against her fingers through the cloth. She wraps an arm around his waist in case he needs to lean on her but won't say and she can feel his ribs through his shirt.

Cas is dead silent in the car, staring down at his hands, which have dirt under the nails and a cut that's only nearly healed. She'd been planning to suggest going out for a post-graverobbing beer but instead she takes them straight back to the Starlight Motel and digs the bottle of Jack out of the backseat floorboard. "Go shower," she tells Cas, shoving the bottle of non-crappy-motel-brand shower gel from her bag into his hands. "You'll feel better."

Cas has a few clothes besides his standard uniform, but other than the boots, he seems to sort of consider them costumes for jobs. Deanna doesn't think Jimmy's stuff is going to be visiting the heavenly laundry anytime soon, though, so she pulls out one of the pairs of thrift-store jeans and searches for a t-shirt that isn't one she bought him as a joke (there's one that says 'Jesus is My Homeboy' and one that says 'Riverdale Angels Basketball') before she got a grasp on what a slap in the face that actually was, and finally has to give up and find the biggest one of her own instead, a soft old one she's had forever and used to sleep in when she lived with Lisa, when she didn't sleep dressed to run out the door. It was her dad's, once upon a time. It used to come down below her knees.

She knocks on the bathroom door and Cas makes some kind of sound that doesn't seem like 'go away' so she sticks her head into the cloud of steam on the other side. "Just brought you some clean clothes," she says. Cas doesn't answer right away so she picks up the neatly folded pile off the counter, brushes away the grave dirt and sets down the clean stuff. "I'm gonna put a load of laundry in down the hall. Everything I own stinks." She thinks she might hear a 'thank you' once the door's shut behind her again, but she might not.

All she has that isn't in dire need of washing is an old hoodie and a pair of running shorts that got hastily stuffed in her bag instead of Sam's when they took off for Detroit months and months ago. Most of Sam's stuff, the stuff she doesn't need day-to-day, anyway, is at Bobby's sealed up in blue plastic bins, but these have stayed in the trunk of the Impala. They probably do need to be washed, but she won't, even though the hoodie doesn't smell like Sam anymore unless she sniffs hard at the back of the collar. It's maybe morbid and creepy, but she remembers Sam in it and the shorts are douchey and make her smile. She's gotten better at thinking about him without feeling like her insides are being sucked into a big stupid pit. Not great, but better. She can still only really talk about Sammy, the genius annoying kid who loved Star Wars and English class and his big sister and wasn't completely screwed up by all this yet.

The mildewy closet that passes itself off as the 'guest laundry' is too gross to be barefoot in and too sad to be swigging Jack straight from the bottle in, but Deanna does both anyway, squatted down with her back against the washer, listening to it knock and hum and trying to get her head around this Cas thing. She doesn't know what the stone-cold-crazy-bitch future version of herself did when the Cas of that world was losing his religion, because it didn't exactly come up in conversation, but she's got a pretty good guess that she told him to suck it up and deal.and tried to ignore all the broken things about him. 

When she gets back to the room, Cas has put on the jeans but nothing else and is staring at himself in the mirror that's still dripping condensation, running his fingers over the more-beard-than-there-used-to-be. "I think you need a shave, man," she says. He doesn't turn around but his eyes are on her reflection for a moment before they drop down to look at neither of them. "Or you could rock the beard thing, I guess."

"I hate this," he says, and it echoes deep and rough off the tiles.

"I know."

"I made this choice knowing the likely outcome, but--"

"It still sucks."

She sees the corner of his mouth twitch. "Yes."

"Would they still take you back? Better to serve in heaven and all that crap?" Wait, that's backwards.

"Would you prefer I go? I know I'm not as useful as I once--"

"Shut up, Cas, of course not." She's not in so much denial that she can't admit to herself that she doesn't know what she'd do with herself if he did go. She'd manage, she always does, but she's not sure for how long. "But I don't want you down here hating life either, pining for the fjords and resenting my dumb ass for making it happen."

"I'm not a dead parrot." She'd be proud of him for getting the reference, but he says it so damn seriously. _This is an ex-angel. It has ceased to be._ Monty Python taken the wrong way can get really fucking existential. "I chose this. I made a shamed exit from the disorder I'd created. Angels aren't designed for free will and I couldn't rule them without-- I'm not equipped for that kind of power. Raphael's no more fit to lead them than I was, and someday it will come down on our heads."

"So if it does, we'll deal with it. That's what we do." She knows what he means. He's told her about Raphael wanting a plural-of-apocalypse rematch smackdown. One that's going to be her fault, again, because Cas (finally) came when she called. Somebody must still be fighting it up there, though, or it would have happened already. She's not sure why Cas thinks he wasn't fit to lead, and he won't say any more than that other than dark looks off to the side. She thinks he could have made a pretty badass head honcho upstairs, but she can't be sorry he's here. Their eyes meet in the mirror and all she can think is how tired Cas looks. His shoulder is still superhuman-hot when she touches it, like it could brand her palmprint on as a match for the one he left on her. She imagines wings between his shoulderblades, what it must feel like to lose them. "Come on," she says. "You need bad TV and whiskey."

They watch Chopped, which ironically has candy canes as one of the secret ingredients. Cooking shows bore the shit out of Deanna but Cas finds them fascinating, and she's okay with this one because of the idiotic reality drama and competition and nobody simpering about garden parties and fennel. She's pretty sure Rachael Ray is a demon and that Guy Fieri made a deal with one. Cas breathes out half a laugh down the neck of the whiskey bottle when she presents the theory and his hair makes a wet imprint on her sleeve when he falls asleep that's still damp when Deanna remembers the clothes in the dryer at three in the morning. She doesn't feel like folding them because it's three in the fucking morning, and the second bed is the best place to dump them. Cas gravitates toward her in his sleep when she lies back down next to him, drifts closer the same way he has with everything else since he came back. She stares at the water stains on the ceiling and feels a little guilty at the twinge of want that curls through her when Cas's hand settles against a bared patch of skin at her back. She wonders where they'd be now if she'd offered to fuck him the night they got kicked out of the brothel. It didn't even cross her mind at first because she was halfway pissed at him, but it did later, for a second, somewhere in the middle of suffocating from laughter and Cas all shocked with his tie askew. But it would've been weird, then. Maybe it'd be weird to him now. She doesn't really want to ask, because the thing about this, with him almost-snoring into her shoulder, it's kind of the least weird thing she's got going for her right now, where she doesn't feel like she's forgotten how to walk and talk and breathe, and Cas is kind of having to learn all that too in a way, so maybe he doesn't need more complications. One of the ceiling stains looks like Abe Lincoln and there are birds starting to make noise outside before she gets her eyes to stay shut.

*

The ritual has to be done not only on the new moon, but under it, which suits Deanna fine because she's had to sneak out of enough motel rooms in her time to avoid being charged extra for scorch marks. But there's a lot of time to kill before midnight, even with errands like taking suits to the cleaners and finding a butcher who even has any lamb's blood to be talked into selling, and a series of phone calls takes them far enough south that Deanna can't help but see Cicero on the map. She knows Cas sees her notice it but he doesn't say anything.

Deanna woke up this morning under covers she never got under, to the laundry folded and to Cas handing her a cup of coffee and looking like a disheveled grad student in his jeans and Jimmy's button-down. He's not awesome at stuff like combing his hair anyway, and even now it's still kind of weirdly lopsided from being slept on wet. He's been pretty quiet all day, but he's not staring into space and ordered both breakfast and lunch without her having to prod him. She knows better than to think that means he's going to be just fine from here on out, but it's a good sign for now.

"It would be more effective if the blood were fresh," Cas says as they leave the butcher's, who thinks they're making some kind of weird old-world soup.

"You wanna slaughter a cute baby lamb, be my guest, but that's all you. What the hell would you even do, break into a petting zoo?" She remembers an eight-year-old Sammy at some county fair wanting to free the ponies from the long spokes they were trussed up to for $1 kiddie rides. Looking back, Sam at eighteen saying he wanted to work for the ACLU shouldn't have been that big a surprise.

"Hopefully it won't come to that," Cas says, too serious, so she makes him eat a sundae at the mall food court and listen to her bitch her way through finding FBI-appropriate shoes that won't send her to an early (earlier) grave and manages to get him to sort-of-smile a couple of times. He looks like he wants to smite slightly creepy "Justin, Sales Associate, May I Help You?" in the Macy's shoe department and she kind of can't blame him.

"What do you think, honey?" she asks when Creepy Justin takes way too much time with too much touching checking the fit of the shoes. It doesn't make dude back off, but Cas's glare finally does and she walks out laughing her ass off.

Cas is Not Amused, though. "You should have requested a different salesperson."

"Look, I got no problem telling creepers where to stick it, but that guy was harmless. Skeevy, but harmless. He'll probably jerk off in his mom's basement thinking about my nasty-ass feet for the next month. Plus, I got a discount."

"You're worth more than that."

It never doesn't make her squirm when he just comes out with stuff like that, all grave and intense, so she just rolls her eyes as hard as she can and tries to make him pick out shirts. "I'm sick of feeling underdressed all the time, suit-boy," she says, which they both know is a lie to avoid mentioning the reality of no more self-cleaning clothes. He doesn't comment on that or the fact that she automatically starts going through a rack of plaid snap-front shirts looking for an extra-large. She gets to do her own smitey glare when some passing teenage mallrats decide to keep passing by repeatedly, giggling and making goo-goo eyes at Cas. Who is completely oblivious and asks if those 'children' are lost, and she laughs and sort of wants to hug him.

They stake out a spot to do the ritual, a nice clearing in a campground they have to pay to get into, but ten bucks beats the hell out of getting interrupted by some park ranger or cemetery caretaker or get-the-hell-outta-my-field dude with a shotgun. Deanna would never have thought of it, but as soon as Cas did it seemed kind of obvious. He says the bigger the fire the better, and nobody's going to think a big-ass fire is weird somewhere everyone else has one.

They don't want to hang around the woods for eight hours, so Deanna practices the incantation in a crappy bar over happy hour beers and nachos, and Cas looks for hunts. She was thinking they'd go to Bobby's once this is done, even though they don't need to get the amulet there now, maybe have a little downtime and let Cas catch up with himself, but he's talking about hauntings in Atlanta, so maybe he'd rather keep busy. Deanna does the driving math that would get them to Georgia by tomorrow night, but Cas says, "I meant Atlanta, Indiana."

Two towns over from Cicero. She only saw it ten times a week to drive Ben to and from the private school that he hated. "I don't think that's a great idea."

"I assumed you'd want to take the opportunity to visit Lisa." Cas is all shuttered with his eyes resolutely on the computer screen. From someone who usually takes eye contact to a new level of extreme, it's unnerving.

"That's the part that's not a great idea." Because want? Yeah, kind of. Should? Not so much. Deanna's been gone six months. She's called a few times but it's been perfunctory, awkward. They don't need her barging back in. 'You're not happy here,' Lisa told her, 'not really,' and Lisa wasn't either. If all she'd left was Sunday waffles and little league and chasing the apple pies and picket fences that Sam would never get to have, fucking bake sales and pre-scheduled 'date nights' and listening to a kid who was kind of becoming almost-hers mouth off about his math teacher and sing along to AC/DC, if that was all, maybe that would be one thing. But Ben caught shit at school when some kids figured out that 'my mom's girlfriend' didn't mean someone she went shopping and got pedicures with, and Lisa didn't know what to do that or with a few of the church ladies quitting her yoga classes, and Deanna wasn't any help other than 'if they don't like it, fuck 'em,' because she was holding on so hard to staying upright. And Cas doesn't know about all of that, no, but it's not fucking fair of him either to try to get her to deal with her shit when he won't deal with his own. "Let's just get the amulet done. If the ritual doesn't work, we'll need to get to Bobby's."

"We need to leave in an hour. You should stop drinking."

Deanna gives him the finger but orders a Coke instead of another round, suggests hustling the bikers in the corner at darts when she's finally managed to recite all of the ritual without Cas having to correct her (fucking Gaelic, what's the matter with Latin?) pronunciation. He doesn't like it, but he can't stop her either. It's easy, flash a little skin and let them go home with blue balls and a hundred bucks poorer. There's one of them she might have even taken up on his 'you wanna get outta here, darlin'?' a year ago, but she's got stuff to do and she hasn't actually wanted to go home with anyone since she left Cicero. Cas doesn't speak on the way to the campground and Deanna doesn't turn off the whiney college radio indie rock he settles the dial on.

Starting a fire when you've just soaked the ground in lamb's blood is kind of a bitch, but once they start chanting, the flames climb so high that she's afraid they might need to be more worried about the wrath of Smokey the Bear than about whatever ancient deity-types they're calling on. She looks at Cas across the flames and remembers him terrifying and otherworldly and crackling power in a broken barn, thundering wing shadows and right now he's not what he's been becoming, what he's been _falling_ into being-- he's a force with lightning in the palms of his hands as he throws herbs and bones and the flames lick higher. Between the hot night and the fire, it's sweltering, but he looks like he could freeze the world with a thought. They say, " _Bíodh amhlaidh_ ," and it echoes loud through the clearing on sound waves that shouldn't be there and the clay dish full of blood and the amulet explodes when it touches the fire and Deanna's vision whites out.

She's not blind, but she's flat on her back in the dirt and feels like she's been punched in the face. The fire's back to its stuttering low ebb now and Cas is kneeling over her. "Did it work?" she asks.

"I believe so." He touches her cheek and she flinches at the wet sting of his thumb in what must be a cut. His hair is wild like he's been in a wind tunnel and his eyes are bright and sad in the firelight. She can feel a hot pressure underneath her skin, like something is _trying_. "You're bleeding," Cas says. "I'm sorry."

He's not sorry that she's bleeding, she knows; he's sorry that she's _still_ bleeding, that his fingers do nothing but smear blood and grit over her face. "Must've been shrapnel from that clay pot thing blowing up. It's okay. I've had worse."

"I know," he says.

She lets Cas clean the cut out ('before I get mad cow disease or something,' she says, but the joke doesn't even raise half a smirk), all slow concentration like he's doing surgery. You'd think she'd just lost a limb. Technically, she has, but it's shaped like a giant moose of a brother who should be the one fixing her up, and there's not gauze enough in the world for it. Cas maybe knows that too, silently takes the traditional post-job beer she hands him from the cooler and they sit on the rocky ground with their shoulders just shy of touching and watch the fire die down and don't talk until Deanna forces herself to her feet and says, "Gotta see a man about a horse."

Cas makes a face. "I still don't understand why that's a euphemism for urination."

"Me neither. Google it or something." She picks up a shotgun and makes her way off into the trees-- there's porta-johns back the other way near the campground's cold spigot showers, but fuck that, she'd rather risk a little splatter on her boots than be locked in something coffin-shaped with other people's shit, plus Cas will be more likely to use them if he needs to if she's nowhere nearby because out of all the gross, weak things almost-humanity comes with, he seems to hate that the most. She kind of gets that, feeling like your body's betraying you, remembers a mortifying day in the sixth grade and having to walk around with a sweatshirt tied around her waist the rest of the day, burning her favorite jeans and shoplifting tampons, the time when she was nineteen and there was a werewolf at just the wrong time and the lecture she got from Dad for not thinking about it and nearly getting them both killed. It probably doesn't compare, but she kind of gets it.

Cas isn't there when she gets back and she spends a few minutes reminding herself not to panic before he emerges from the expected direction, looking defeated. She sees the furrow between his eyebrows relax when she doesn't say anything, just gets another couple of beers and pulls the scratchy old army surplus blanket out of the backseat floorboard. After a while of sitting on it looking up at the stars, Cas points at one and tells her about watching it come into being.

"It was beautiful and terrible," he says with a hitch in his throat. "They all were. But that one came about shortly after Balthazar disappeared, and I stood and watched gas and atoms collapse into a supernova for what would have been thousands of years in human perception."

"Who was Balthazar?" she asks. They're lying on their backs now, beers forgotten, and turning her face toward him makes her forehead touch a sweat-warm shoulder.

"A friend. A brother. Brother-in-arms might be the nearest thing in your understanding. Angels-- most angels-- don't compartmentalize love the way humans do, but there are different degrees of connection, affinity. We were close."

"I'm sorry," Deanna says, because she knows what it is to lose a brother, whatever else this Balthazar might have been. Her fingers find their way into his hair and stay there after they've both closed their eyes, and are still there when they wake wet with dew and squinting into the sunrise through the trees.

*

The Atlanta haunting is a textbook salt-and-burn, no surprises. Deanna's buoyed high on things going well for once, and it's contagious, with Cas loose and talkative over a pitcher of beer and not having to be persuaded to try the onion rings, which he eats with an experimental delicacy that's almost scientific and makes Deanna feel warm. She drinks so much that she has to stagger back to the motel with Cas's arm around her, as sure and warm and solid as it ever was when he was all angel all the time. In the morning, she vaguely recalls trying to make him sing along to her drunk-botched version of 'Paradise City' and sort of succeeding, but not collapsing in a heap with him on one of the beds, still on top of the covers. It's happened enough times now that it's not _that_ weird, but the morning wood pressing into her hip is new. She doesn't get much time to actually think about it because as soon as she's awake enough that she can think at all, she realizes she needs to puke.

Cas stays comatose when she extricates herself and runs for the bathroom and he mercifully stays that way until she's finished and cleaned up and showered. He's either got enough of his ridiculously high alcohol tolerance left or is just one of those assholes who doesn't get hangovers. "You're gonna have to drive," she admits reluctantly. "Think I'm still drunk."

It's the first time Cas has driven the Impala with Deanna actually in it when she wasn't teaching him or actively bleeding to death, and she's quaky and nervous at first, but Cas handles the car gently, with respect, and Deanna finds herself calmed watching the steering wheel slide through his hands.

"Dude," she says at the diner when she realizes Cas has just gone and ordered for her.

"The waitress asked you three times and you only said 'urgh.'"

And fair enough, Cas did fine, got her a big greasy plate of eggs and sausage and toast, though she doesn't end up being able to stomach much of it, sticks mostly to the coffee and to swiping Cas's orange juice until she feels somewhat human again. The irony of wanting that while sitting across from Cas, who'd like to feel any other way at all, is not lost on her. She remembers him lost in the future dry-swallowing speed, downing whole liquor stores when they got the secondhand Dear John from God, and wonders if maybe easing it up on the booze might be a good idea, for the sake of keeping him in one piece. But then again, she's the one with the raging hangover and he's the one looking a little bit amused when the waitress says there aren't free refills on orange juice.

They overstay their welcome in the diner by a good while, because Deanna knows that once they walk out the door she has to decide. Lisa's fifteen minutes down this road, and then there are all the other roads. "Why the hell are you so gung-ho about it, anyway?" she asks when Cas prods her again, winces when she slams the door of the Impala a little too hard. She doesn't put the key in the ignition.

"Because I think you're avoiding it out of fear."

"Hey, kettle, you sure are black. Fear of what, another grand tour of life don't work out that way? I know you'd flap back off to heaven if you could, but that's you, not me. It wasn't like that. Damn, you'd think you wanted me to go back."

"I do if you'd be happy there."

"Are you even hearing yourself? Yeah, no shit, I'm a miserable fucker. You think playing house and fakin' it till I make it's going to fix me? Make me have gone to hell any less, make my brother any less stuck in a cage with Satan or make the people we lost putting him there any less dead? Bullshit and you and I and everyone else know it. Even as bad as I want that to be all I want, it's not, and they're a hell of a lot safer without me than with. You know that too or else you'd be having Sunday dinners with the Novaks." The Novaks, that isn't fair and it isn't true but it's not damn fair what Cas is trying to drag out of her either. She should feel a perverse satisfaction in watching it hit home and sting, but it pretty much just feels like kicking a guy when he's down.

"The situations aren't similar," Cas says, quiet and severe, his face gone impassive to erase the little gutpunching flash of hurt. "I simply look like someone they once loved."

"Like I'm who Ben and Lisa loved? Same damn thing. They love some chick that looks like me who fixes the sink and makes pancakes. I can fake it pretty good, but I can't fake it that hard for that long."

"You left abruptly with matters unresolved. It could be they're willing to accept you as you are, if you'll allow it."

Deanna shuts her eyes and rests her head on the steering wheel and inhales the leather-gun-oil-her-and-Sam scent (the Sam part is fading, but she knows it's there, and there's a little bit of Cas there now too) that still smells like home. "So, what, I need closure? I already know how it ends. I wasn't the only one faking it there."

"Dee," Cas says, and she doesn't call him on it. She feels the heat of his hand hovering over the back of her neck and wants to say 'don't,' but she doesn't, so it comes down and brushes her hair aside and his fingertips ghost unsure against her skin. "You can change how it ends, if anyone can. If it can end well, you deserve it to."

Deanna draws in a breath that shakes in her throat. There's a little curl of _something_ under her skin, like she felt when Cas tried to heal her, a pale imitation of the crackle of power that could once mend bones and bend time and touch away nightmares. Someday soon, she thinks, it'll just be a touch, just human to human. "You ever heard of a hunter with a family? One that's still all there, I mean. I can't have that, 'cause there's always that chance of work following me home wanting blood." She sits up and it makes her neck press back against Cas's palm, and he doesn't move his hand away. "I don't want Ben to be able to assemble a twelve-gauge with his eyes shut and name off how to kill two dozen kinds of monsters better than he knows his multiplication tables, I don't want Lisa checking the damn devil's traps every night. I want them eating pancakes and apple pie and not looking over their shoulders every minute, and the way they get to have that is without me."

"Isn't it their choice to make?"

" _No._ Even if they thought they knew what they were signing up for, no. You never get it until someone's dead, and I don't want them to get it." A reflexive move to scratch at the back of her neck reminds her that Cas's hand is still there, and her fingers catch between his. He's getting a callus between his left thumb and forefinger from aiming shotguns. "I dragged enough people down with me."

"I wasn't dragged," Cas says, hearing what she isn't saying. "I made a choice."

"Yeah, and look how awesome you feel now."

"I'll live," Cas says, with bitter twist to half a smile, and squeezes her hand.

*

_Come around 5_ , Lisa's text says. Yeah, so what if Deanna was too chickenshit to call. They've killed time with laundry and cleaning guns and loading salt rounds, looking for any jobs that might need doing between Cicero and Sioux Falls because whatever Cas might think, Deanna knows she's not staying, not coming back unless it's life or death. Closure's a crappy Dr. Phil word for it, but that's really all she's expecting from this. The whiskey was mysteriously missing when she went looking for it, and it's Sunday in Indiana so she can't get any more. She settles for a couple of beers with lunch and eyeing Cas suspiciously.

He tries to say he'll stay in the motel room and read or look for cases, maybe go to a movie. Cas likes movies for some reason, same as he likes TV, maybe something between scientific curiosity and escapism, but Deanna hasn't asked. "We can go to the movies later," Deanna tells him. "I don't think this is gonna take long."

Cas nods. "Call me when you're ready."

Deanna leans back into the car window after she's gotten out, the house a looming presence at her back. "Hey, stick around for like ten minutes, okay? If it goes really shitty I don't want to be standing around."

Cas nods again and turns on NPR. Deanna smiles and shakes her head and lets that carry her up the porch steps to ring the doorbell. She still has a key but it's hanging from the ring in the Impala's ignition. There's one house in the world she can just walk into anymore, and Bobby being Bobby, even that's not always a great idea if you like not getting shot.

The azaleas out front that she and Lisa planted together are blooming and Deanna remembers that trip to Home Depot like a shock, them laughing about how their cart had a bad wheel that made a fart noise and looking like any other two people in the garden center picking out shrubs, picking up Ben from baseball practice right after and how he bitched about having to sit between the plants in the backseat. How alien all the _normal_ felt, like she was playing a part in another archangel-engineered show. She was surprised every morning when she walked out the door to find the damn things still alive, that they hadn't just up and died because she touched them. There was a brief running joke about whose bush was doing better, another one of those quippy domestic things that didn't feel like reality as much as drinking and nightmares did. Now they're flowering huge and pink and a humid breeze brings over a whiff of honeysuckle from the neighbors' yard.

Then there's Lisa in the doorway and how many times have they looked at each other like this over one threshold or another? "Hey," Deanna says. Lisa hugs her, smells like foofy aromatherapy bath stuff and her hair's still wet and it's like a thousand other moments that didn't have the Impala idling in the background. Lisa feels strangely small in her arms, not fragile because she never was and never will be, but small, because lately Cas is the only person she's been this close to, even though Deanna's hands remember just where they fit best.

They don't kiss. Lisa smiles tight and sad and says, "It's good to see you."

"You too."

There's beer in the kitchen, a brand new six-pack of Deanna's favorite that she knows Lisa bought special, and a thick silence that's wider than the space of countertop between them. "Ben's spending the night at Steven's," Lisa says before Deanna can ask.

"You didn't tell him I was coming." Deanna has to try pretty hard to keep a note of accusation out of her voice, even though she gets it.

Lisa shakes her head. "He's just starting to get back to normal. _We're_ just starting to get back to normal. It's not fair to him to have you show back up if you're not staying."

Normal's a good way of putting it. Normal's a thing that can't happen if she's around, not really, for a lot of reasons. There was never really a question of whether or not she was going to stay, for either of them. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Deanna says.

"I know."

She makes sure Lisa has Bobby's number, a shotgun, salt rounds, shows her how to bless holy water over the rain barrel out back. There's still a jar of it under what used to be Deanna's side of the bed. All the things she didn't want Lisa to have to think about, but she can't leave without doing it, either.

"You left the car running?" Lisa asks, looking out to the street.

"Yeah, I uh..." she scratches the back of her neck over the sweat-damp strands of hair coming loose from a hasty ponytail. "I asked Cas to wait a few minutes, in case you kicked me out right away." It's been more than ten now. Cas is either pulling his infinite patience routine or else has dozed off to _All Things Considered_.

"I wouldn't have. I never will, if you ever need to come back." There's no chill on the breeze but Lisa crosses her arms, rubs at them.

"That's--" Deanna swallows against her throat tightening. "Thanks." She knows she won't, but it means something that she could.

"If you're staying for dinner, it's pretty rude to leave him out there." Lisa's got on that crafty little half-smile she uses when a suggestion is really a demand. It's not quite all there the way Deanna remembers, but it's close. 

"I wasn't, uh."

"Come on, you have to eat somewhere, right? You don't get to show up for half an hour and walk right back out. He does eat, doesn't he?"

"He's not a pet." Deanna says it a little harsher than she really means to, but it rubbed her the wrong way a little.

"Easy, tiger. Just a question. I don't know how the angel thing works."

"Yeah, he does. But look, do me a favor and don't mention the angel thing?"

"Okay," Lisa says on a slow, expectant note, but Deanna just goes out to the car, where Cas blinks out of a doze.

"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, we're invited to dinner." 

Cas sucks at dinner small talk. Which Deanna sort of gets, because it's not like he has anything _small_ to talk about and now that she thinks about it, he's pretty much never talked to any regular people outside of jobs. She's just gotten used to the random history lessons and bad almost-jokes, but Lisa hasn't. Lisa's not even sure Cas knows how to peel a potato and asks Deanna about it under her breath behind the fridge door when he asks if he can do anything to help. 

"I dunno," Deanna says, not whispering, with a sense of vague insult she can't really put a finger on. "Hey, Cas, how are you at peeling potatoes?" She tosses one in his direction and he catches it, turns it over in his hand like he's trying to read its mind.

"There's no need to peel them," he says. She half expects some history of potatoes to go along with it but that's all he says.

"Well, yeah, you can eat the skins, but mashed potatoes are gross like that."

"I assume I can manage it," he says, more to Lisa than to Deanna, and he manages it fine.

The kitchen is quieter than she ever remembers it being. Ben should be here trying to steal bites of the cheese Lisa's grating and schizophrenically surfing through the radio or his iPod. Someone should laugh. The picture of the three of them isn't on the bulletin board by the back door anymore. She wonders if it's in a box somewhere, or just in the dump. For all of the thousands of things she can talk to Cas about and all of the thousands of things she can talk to Lisa about, Lisa and Cas don't seem to be able to talk to each other about anything. Lisa seems to be at a loss for the usual getting-to-know-you stuff, the where-are-you-from and what-do-you-do, since she knows but Deanna's told her not to mention it. The only thing they really have in common is Deanna, so the longest conversation that takes place just between the two of them involves Deanna rolling her eyes and grumbling protests while they discuss her Dr. Sexy habit, and that lasts all of two minutes. Deanna talking to one of them ends up with the other left out, because her 'polite' conversation topics are basically music and movies and cars, and neither of them like the same things as the other or care about engine specs or that Angus Young doesn't practice his stage antics. It goes quietest of all when Deanna asks how Ben's doing in school, and Lisa doesn't really answer.

Lisa's bought a pie from Deanna's favorite bakery. Apple. They eat it with ice cream and more silence on the back porch, on chairs that weren't here when Deanna last was.

"Happy?" Deanna asks Cas when they've thanked Lisa for dinner and gotten into the Impala with a banker's box that Lisa brought from upstairs of stuff that Deanna forgot and there's a lingering dampness on her cheek from a friendly brush of Lisa's lips, a warmth on her ear from a whispered 'take care of yourself.'

Cas frowns at her like the potato he was looking at earlier.

"Screw it," she says. "We still in time to get to that movie of yours?" She cranks up the air and the tape deck so they can't talk.

*

The movie Cas was thinking about seeing turns out to be an old silent film Deanna's never heard of, at a little arty theater all the way in Lafayette. It's called _Intolerance_ and watches like an after-school special. People keep shushing them because Cas can't stop picking apart the historical inaccuracies, which is sort of stupid because it's not like there's anything to hear except music that sounds like moustache-twirling villains tying girls to train tracks. And hey, who knew the Tower of Babel was made of shit. The popcorn sucks but the perk of arty theaters, or this one anyway, is a full bar next to the concession stand. Five-dollar beers aren't really her style, but they don't suck to drink, and Cas sporting a foamstache and getting crankier by the minute about everything the movie's getting wrong makes up for the movie itself.

She hasn't been to a lot of movies in actual theaters-- a few on high school dates that she didn't exactly watch, and she made sure Sammy got to go to all three of the Star Wars re-releases (plus Episode One, which he bitched about for a solid month after). She and Lisa never went because they could never agree on anything, but they took Ben to one of the Harry Potters, which did not make Deanna hate witches any less, though she sort of felt for the whole destiny thing. And the first job that was just her and Sam happened in a place like this. They had to pull the fire alarm to get everybody out so they could burn whatever remains were lingering on the dress of a washed-up 40s starlet in a lobby display case.

Deanna pictures everyone in this audience running for the exits like those people did. It's not a full house and the emergency exits open straight up onto the back parking lot. They could all get out in thirty seconds, tops. She scratches at her leg where the knife strapped into her boot is getting itchy and sweaty against her skin. She saw Cas's eyes fall on each exit sign when they sat down, before the lights dimmed. She can't remember if that's something she told him to do or if he just knows. The soldiers on the movie screen make her think it didn't have anything to do with her.

She ends up sunk down low in her seat with her feet up on the empty one in front of her, though Cas is still sitting straight up like he's got a stick up his ass.

"That would be uncomfortable," he says, one corner of his mouth tugging upward, and she accidentally laughs too loud during a serious part. She jogs her knee against Cas's and he relaxes his back, but it's so artificial it's almost worse and she laughs more.

*

The first thing Deanna does when they get to Bobby's is come down with a cold. She's been feeling that little itch somewhere between her throat and the insides of her ears that makes her want to jam a knife in there to get at it (she settles for jabbing q-tips in way deeper than you're supposed to) for a couple of days now, but other than popping a couple of dayquil and ordering her own OJ instead of just stealing Cas's, she's been ignoring it.

She tries to blame her scratchy throat on the dust that pervades every corner of Bobby's house, clouds up when you open books, but by the end of the first afternoon there she's got a choice between blowing her nose till her brain comes out with it or swallowing throatfuls of snot, because apparently her brain tipped off her immune system that there was going to be some down time.

Being sick makes her pissy, always has. Used to be she could order Sam around, act pitiful and make him bring her soup and magazines, and he'd do the same to her when he inevitably caught it next (and inevitably one of them would say at some point, 'dammit, you run after ghosts sprained and bleeding but you're acting like some little cold's going to kill you'), but Bobby's not too inclined to take any crap from her and his one concession to doing a little nursemaiding is to grumble through cabinets and find her her own bottle of whiskey so she won't get her snot-germs on any of his.

And as for Cas, well, you'd think she had the fucking plague. He's sat by and watched her with worse, healed her from worse-- hell, done worse to her himself ('cause angels? not so much with the no-hitting-girls thing, especially when they think you're about to give the okay to be a rental tux for the apocalpyse prom) and not acted like whatever was physically wrong was any big deal. He's hovering around being stiff and quiet and keeping a safer-than-usual distance, and occasionally staring at her as though she might either explode or spontaneously be fine again, and it's damn distracting. She's just trying to lie there and be miserable and watch a Dr. Sexy rerun on Bobby's stolen cable, and he's just sitting there being shifty and doing a really shitty job of trying to look like he's actually paying attention to whatever he's doing on the laptop.

"Seriously, Cas. I'm not going to drop dead. If you're not gonna entertain me or make me soup or whatever, then go find Bobby and... I dunno, weld something. Check the panic room sigils. Get drunk and run naked through the scrapyard, I don't care, but right there with your nonverbal staring deal, you're driving me nuts."

The corners of Cas's mouth twitch down for a moment. "I'm sorry," he says in that grave too-sorry way that makes her feel (more) like crap. "Would you like me to make you soup?"

It's really a little hot for soup but damned if she's mentioning that now. Cas likes to be useful and maybe he's acting like a freak because he can't just wave a hand and cure the common cold anymore. She's not even sure he knows how to make soup, but it's not like it's hard and he did fine with Lisa's potatoes, so she tells him where the cans and can opener and the pots are and he disappears for twenty minutes and she gets to watch Dr. Sexy and wallow in peace.

Cas comes back with a bowl and spoon set on top of a plate. It's tomato rice and it's not exactly illness-related that Deanna has to swallow against her throat going tight because the memories of her mom and soup and Beatles lullabies are fresher in her mind than they used to be. Cas was miles away and passed out for that conversation, but either he somehow knew or that was just what was in the pantry. She wouldn't put it past Bobby to keep a couple of cans of it hanging around because Bobby _does_ know. Deanna made it for Sam sometimes when he was little, but she never sang. "Thanks," she says, thick and sore.

He's quiet while she eats, still tense. She figures out why when he says, "I think my throat hurts."

 _Shit._ It's maybe like that thing where somebody talks about fleas and you start itching, but maybe it's not. "You think it hurts, or it hurts?"

"It's a little hard to tell how things are supposed to feel," he snaps.

"Okay," she says, and gets interrupted by a sneezing fit, starts over not so defensive. "Okay, there's some orange juice in the fridge. Won't hurt to drink some." She breaks a couple of dayquil off the blister pack. "And take those. I dunno if they'll work on you but it's worth a shot." Because what the hell's the dosage for an almost-ex-angel whose entire-liquor-store hangover took an entire bottle of aspirin?

And suddenly she remembers all the shots she got as a kid, all the ones she told Sammy not to be a pussy about, all the suckers and cartoon band-aids and nurses in cheerful teddy-bear scrubs, and later Dad giving tetanus shots he got from fuck-knows-where. All the shots Cas has never had against all the stuff he might be able to catch now. Jimmy must have, but who the hell knows how well any of it's stuck. She's got her boots halfway on by the time Cas comes back out of the kitchen. "Cas?" she says at his bewildered head-tilt. "Just how exactly-like-Jimmy did your body come back after Lucifer blew you up?"

The waiting room at the free clinic is a special kind of hell, crying babies and people who sound sicker than Deanna, one very obvious hooker, some old folks who look like they're at death's door, and she thinks they might both catch something else just being here but now that she's realized this needs to happen, it seems too urgent to take the time to commit insurance fraud, like Cas is going to get the fucking mumps or something if he's not vaccinated six ways to Sunday in the next hour. Cas looks miserable and winces every time there's a cry or a cough and they just sit there not talking on hard chairs until their number is called.

The nurse is bored and young and doesn't give a damn why a grown man suddenly needs every shot in the book, even though Deanna was totally prepared with a story about Cas just having converted his way out of one of those religious groups who don't believe in medicine. The nurse's scrubs are plain hospital blue and the band-aids don't have any cartoons on them. They give him a little bag full of STD pamphlets and condoms, standard issue, which Deanna laughs at and Cas doesn't.

"You okay?" she asks in the parking lot.

He glares at her, which fair enough because it's kind of an exercise in indignity even when you're used to it, and spends the ride back to Bobby's staring out the window. He disappears among the labyrinth of cars as soon as they stop moving and she lets him go. She takes the hottest shower she can in the crappy-pressured hard water and for ten whole seconds she can breathe like a normal person, but then it all goes back to shitty when the steam clears.

She's hitting her special medicinal whiskey bottle and channel-surfing when Bobby comes in, eyes the pile of used tissues next to her and her wet stringy hair and says, "If you ain't the most pitiful thing I ever saw," not uncaringly.

"Shove it," she says, though it comes out more like 'shub id' because her nose has done a snot refill.

"Where'd angel-boy get off to?"

"I dunno. Went for a walk. Don't call him that where he can hear you."

"Gotta make a house call up by Watertown since your sorry ass'd probably just sneeze at the ghost. Think you can handle the phones?"

"Done it before. I guess they'll think I'm real dedicated, coming into work sick and all." She kind of actually hates it, because everyone who calls is either expecting Bobby or a man. Both hunters and local law enforcement often share the trait of generally being dicks and not thinking someone without a dick might know what the fuck she's talking about, and that actually she might should get back to being chained to the stove. But she can be a dick right back if she needs to. "You headed out now?"

"Yep. Couple days tops. Meeting up with Rufus-- sounds like a sonofabitch to kill but pretty standard. Try to keep the house standing."

"Do my best," she says with a grin that kind of hurts because her whole fucking face hurts. "Hey, Bobby? Be careful, okay?"

"When ain't I?"

"Usually."

"Idjit." He gives her a rough squeeze to the shoulder. "Take care of yourself, girl. World ain't gonna end if you get some sleep."

She does fall asleep, wakes up feeling raspy and feverish and a little drunk to the sound of the CDC phone ringing in the kitchen. She does her best to sound frigid-bitch and berates a medical examiner somewhere in the ass end of Georgia for calling her 'personal cell' at this time of night (it's dark and the kitchen clock says 3:37) and of course she sent Garth, whoever the hell Garth is. 

Thing is, it's ass o'clock at night and no amount of checking upstairs or shouting to the basement or shoving her way into the panic room gets an answer from Cas. She's dizzy and maybe feverish and whether her heart's pounding like crazy because of worry or a meth-lab's-worth of decongestants goes unexamined as she finds shoes and a flashlight and staggers out into the salvage yard. It's dark and desert-chill foggy and all she can think about is the one set of needles Cas didn't get poked into his skin today, how whatever he technically is, he's all by himself in his body and if he can get the sniffles and need flu shots, then he probably doesn't have enough angel left now to keep out what the fuck ever feels like black-smoking its way in. She hadn't been too worried about it before, since Cas seemed to still have a little something, but something about today and the time of night and all the shit whirling around in her head has her closer to panic than she wants to be. She doubles back to dig a sharpie out of the chaos of the kitchen junk drawer (they're kind of all junk drawers, but some of them are heavier on the junk than the silverware) because he's not spending another minute without that symbol on him once she finds him, and a rosary and salt and holy water just in case.

Cas doesn't answer when she calls out-- just her voice echoing off metal and dirt and her heartbeat in her ears, and the flashlight beam muddles useless in the fog. She finds him, finally, by chance, sitting silent and motionless on what's left of the hood of a rusted-out Ford pickup.

"Cas?"

He looks at her like he doesn't see a half-damp rat's nest of hair and a nose gone red and raw all the way down to her upper lip. She heaves herself up on the hood next to him, metal and an old dead suspension creaking under her weight. "I was shouting my head off, man. Why didn't you answer?"

"I wasn't listening," Cas says, eyes focused far out into the fog. There's an open cut on his palm, probably from some car, and way to put the brand-new tetanus shot straight to work. No need to make a big scene of it, so she slips her hand against his. Nothing happens when her silver ring touches the cut, except that his fingers close around her hand and keep it there. "I prayed and no one answered."

"That's kinda par for the course." Except for when she'd pray to Cas, but she's not going to mention that. "Someone you wanted to see?" She wouldn't blame him for wanting back into the heaven club after today.

"Not in particular. I asked for guidance." He's gripping her hand so hard it hurts.

"They're not big up there on handing that out."

"No."

There are no stars to be seen through the fog but they look up at them anyway, silent with sweat prickling between their hands. Cas was always fever-hot, grace-hot, but now she wonders if it's just a fever. "Hey, Cas?" Deanna says after a long stretch of saying nothing, and he still doesn't say anything but his eyes shift off the sky to hers. "Don't run off and not answer, okay? You need your me-time or whatever, that's cool, and I know you could probably take anything that came after you, but--"

"I'm sorry to have worried you," he says, so she doesn't have to.

She remembers the sharpie in her pocket and Cas sits still for her to stretch the collar of his shirt down and draw the anti-possession sigil over his heart. He doesn't have scars like she does, even though she doesn't have as many as she used to, just smooth pale skin with a light dusting of dark hairs that she knows are thicker further down the center of his chest. It would be easier to concentrate without having to sniff against her nose dripping every three seconds, but she does a good enough job. "Just for now," she says, and has to clear her throat. "Bobby's got some amulets somewhere but a tattoo's the best idea."

Cas nods, solemn, and they stay where they are until the sun starts to come up and burn off the fog.

*

Cas sits stoically still for the tattoo artist, a woman named Elaine with long silver hair, a two-packs-a-day voice, and a faded orange phoenix crinkling like parchment in the tanned skin of one arm. Elaine's not big on small talk, which is fine with Deanna in general, but it's dead quiet except for the buzz of the machine and she feels pointless and twitchy, half woozy on too little sleep and too much cough syrup and leafing through the same weathered magazine because it's not like Cas needs his hand held.

In 2014, she saw a less artistic version of what's now taking shape on Cas's chest, when he changed his shirt before setting off on the suicide mission. She asked when he got it and there was a grim twist to his mouth when he said, 'You did it for me.' It got grimmer and joined a hollow laugh when she asked what she did it with, a box cutter and an inkpen? She tried to give herself one when she was fifteen, a skull and crossbones or something stupid like that, but it healed out to a vague blob on her ankle and eventually disappeared completely.

Cas breathes out a loud sigh when Elaine wipes off the ink and blood with an antiseptic-soaked towel, and Deanna sees that a fine sheen of sweat has broken out on his forehead. "See what you think," Elaine says, and points to a mirror.

"Damn, Cas, don't poke it," Deanna says. Cas drops his hand from where he was raising it to do just that, but his reflection shoots her a glare as Elaine tapes Saran wrap on him.

"Didn't hurt too bad?" she asks once they're on the way back to Bobby's.

"No," Cas says. There's a high flush on his cheeks and the antiseptic smell is mingling with the Impala's leather. Deanna spends a wait at a red light watching his right hand squeeze into a fist on his knee, then unclench and tap fingertips against denim. Cas used to be so frustratingly serenely still so much of the time, so controlled even when the sky was falling. Well, except when he wasn't. That's the thing, though-- he's twitchy like this now more often than he's not.

She talks him into lunch by way of a peace offering, which is enough like giving a treat to a dog who's had to go to the vet to make her lip curl up over her teeth if she thinks about it too long. Cas is more interested in his milkshake than his burger, and Deanna ends up eating the entire order of onion rings they're supposed to be splitting, even though she still can't taste much of anything.

There's a little kid at the table across from them, coloring outside the lines on the paper placemat while his mother ignores him in favor of her phone and spoons chili blindly into her mouth. She's around Deanna's age, probably a little younger, with highlights in her hair and a manicure on her nails. There was a time when Deanna would have computed face value to 'dumb bitch.' Sam once said it was internalized misogyny-- just the one time, since she threatened to punch him in the balls.

Cas has a newspaper in front of him, but the only weird thing going on in Sioux Falls is that the paper still runs Marmaduke. "I don't understand why a dog would need a flashlight," he says, and it's so much of a throwback to the confounded-by-humans 'this is a den of iniquity' angel he's been growing out of that she sort of wants to kiss him.

She doesn't, but she does laugh until she's doubled over with the coughing fit it's caused.

*

Downtime at Bobby's is more like killing time. Deanna has to impersonate an insurance agent because Bobby's gotten his leg fucked up by the hunt he was on with Rufus. He's fine except for a few pints of blood and a fuckload of stitches, but it makes 'couple days' stretch into 'couple-few days' territory.

Cas doesn't get a cold in the end, and Deanna gets better aside from some lingering phlegm. She shows him how to flush a radiator and makes him shoot cans off the fence. She should drill him like her dad did, disassembling and reassembling shotguns blindfolded, reloading with one hand tied, but she doesn't. She corrects his stance with hands on his hips and shoulders and arms, and honestly he's gotten to be a pretty good shot even without real lessons, just thrown into the fire. It's too easy to feel his bones through his too-new t-shirt and his elbows and wrists feel like they might cut through his skin.

Cas is better with a sawed-off than a pistol, as though he's built to withstand the recoil, and it's not just that a shell full of shot has a better chance of hitting something. With the cars, he likes all the fiddly little parts of putting on brake pads better than he likes changing oil; he looks comically disgusted when he tries to mount a tire, but he whips in an alternator on the first try nearly as fast as she can.

The days are nasty and hot with too few clouds and they come in with their clothes sweat-plastered to their skin and drink beer on the porch. That's the part she likes, with Cas wrung out and exhausted and sore and finally, finally _still_ , like he's forgotten all the shit weighing him down. She knows he hasn't any more than she has-- even sweaty and greasy with sun-warm paint-chipping boards under her bare feet and a cold Grain Belt in her hand that she's trying to drink before it warms up enough to actually taste it, it's all still there gnawing at the back of her mind and Sam is still dead. But it feels more like she's allowed to tell all that to shut the hell up when they're leaning against the steps and watching the sun go down over car skeletons and all loose from working. Cas lets his knees splay apart in his secondhand jeans and lets Deanna dare him to crush a beer can against his forehead and she wants to laugh until she's sick.

Cas gets fascinated with a _Criminal Minds_ marathon and Deanna thinks she liked it better when he was fixated on the Food Network, because she fucking hates procedural crime dramas. She has to admit the quirky hacker girl is pretty cool, though. She should probably like the ex-CIA badass chick better, but she seems pretty whiny for a secret agent. The overly-literal genius guy in ridiculous grandpa outfits kind of reminds her of Cas, the way he just spouts facts for any situation. Cas tells her that genius-guy was a child prodigy and that his mother is mentally ill and asks if Deanna knows how to play chess.

"Sammy tried to teach me a few times, but I suck at that kind of stuff. Couldn't keep all the squares and all the damn rules straight," she says with a shrug, followed by a series of rough coughs because of the crap that's settled into her lungs. She wonders if angels just sort of automatically get stuff like chess, the way they get seven million languages and eight zillion years of history and know how to map out the exits, but she doesn't ask. Instead she stretches a leg out across the sofa to poke him in the knee with her toe and tells him they should make enchiladas.

For all she spent years making sure Sam got the recommended daily whatever, Deanna still pretty much sucks at cooking. Hazard of the job. There were a couple of schools she went to that happened to be having bake sales during what she thought of back then as incarceration, and she always slunk away from the sign-up sheets and rolled her eyes at the fluffy cupcakes other girls brought in. Until that time Sam joined the Mathletes, when they weren't even staying somewhere with a damn _oven_ , and he scorched two batches of microwave brownies and set off the fire alarm before Deanna eventually cussed him out and bought cookies at the grocery store, which Sammy insisted had to be put on a plate ("a _real_ plate, Dee") as though nobody would notice they were from the Safeway bakery. But goddammit, even if it had to be Spaghettios with a side of Lucky Charms, she made sure every chance she got that Sam could eat enough to grow circus-freakishly tall. On a rare checkup with a pediatrician when she was ten or so, the guy told her she'd be six feet tall one day. She suspects that got stunted by coffee at twelve and cigarettes at fourteen. Sam, though, he'd probably have grown to be seven feet tall if she could have kept him in broccoli for the formative years.

She tells Cas this while she's mutilating tortillas and burning her fingers and both their tongues on the cheese that leaks out into the skillet and gets fried all oily and crunchy. He argues with her about what the recipe says versus what she's doing, and, well, she sucks at cooking and he's actually right, and she probably shouldn't really be surprised.

"You're totally studying some kind of pie recipe, stat," she tells him.

Cas smiles. She knows he's a little drunk, ignoring other shit the same way she is, but it's still a hell of a thing to see, one of those vacation-picture smiles with a laugh behind it. She knows Cas is a little drunk because she's ended up more than a little drunk herself, even after a pile of tortillas and beef and cheese and sauce.

She blames the enchiladas, later, when she wakes up from a nightmare about Sam in the pit, too vivid and too bloody and his voice too clear screaming her name, and she can't see anything but razors and fire and she can't breathe and she can't get to him or move or do anything, just hear him calling and calling to her. Cas shakes her awake, both hands on her shoulders and his eyes wide and wild.

"You were screaming," he says. It's not really a surprise. Her dream-brain, her subconscious, it knows at this point when she's somewhere it's safe to scream the damn walls down. "Then you stopped breathing." That's new. Cas probably imagined it, or she was snoring or something. He looks like some kind of mad scientist with his hair all crazy, grave eyes and a frown, and he hasn't let go of her shoulders so she can feel how fast his pulse is, or maybe that's hers.

"It's okay," she says, swallowing around a sour metallic taste in her mouth. "I'm okay." It's too hot to sleep under the weathered old quilt that's on this bed, but she wrestles the top sheet out from where it's tangled between her legs and pulls it over both of them and falls asleep thinking that Cas smells less like the ozone-lightning-seawater that used to fill the air when he appeared, and more like a man who's done his share of sweating for the day.

She's drooling on his collarbone when she wakes up, which would be kind of embarrassing if it were anyone else. They've both kicked the sheet off of them, so it's just her in underwear and a ratty disintegrating wife-beater and Cas in a pair of nearly-brand-new boxer shorts (the 'either sleep in your clothes or your underwear, but you have to wear _some_ thing' conversation was a fun moment in Deanna's life), and she wonders if this apparently recent morning wood development is just humanity coming to call or has something to do with her, or some of both. It's not exactly cool to lie there staring at your bedmate's dick (no matter that it's covered) if there's not already an arrangement where you touch it, though, so she eases out and goes downstairs to make coffee.

Cas is freshly showered and fully dressed when he comes down, and his feet creak down the stairs about the same time as gravel crunches in the driveway and Bobby bangs through the door with a brand-new cane and a scowl.

"Hell, Bobby, if I knew you were coming I'd have put on pants." 

"Don't do me any favors," Bobby grumbles, and throws himself into the chair across from her. She wonders if he's making any assumptions about her state of undress, but he's not throwing her any funny looks, just says, "Fuckin' Rufus. 's that bacon?"

It was bacon for two, so she gives Bobby half and Cas half and makes herself a piece of toast. At least Cas has quit denying it when he's hungry. It's more than a little weird to sit in Bobby's kitchen with no pants on and still thinking about Cas's junk (because there are guys you think about as guys, and then there are guys you think about as guys with cocks that do stuff, and the lines have been blurring here for a while, but there's thinking about it and then there's thinking about it) so she gets the hell upstairs and into a shower and clothes as soon as she can.

When she comes back down, Bobby and Cas are leaning together over a newspaper and Sam's laptop. Two teenagers in two weeks have gone missing from a roadside amusement park in Minnesota, and there's a pattern-- it's happened every ten years in the same place at the same time of year, back before the park even existed, as far back as the records go, but nobody's ever connected it, at least officially.

Deanna gets growled at by Bobby for asking if he needs her to stick around, and she's just as happy to get back on the road as she is not to have to watch him with the cane, because however temporary it might be, memories are memories.

*

Just south of Mille Lacs, Deanna's about ready to pull over and squat in a ditch before her bladder bursts, but there's a diner off the roadside so just-barely in time that she leaves the keys in the ignition and Cas in the passenger seat. She was afraid a place called Happy's might be clown-themed, but it isn't, and she comes out to find Cas sitting in a booth with the keys front of him, and remembers that it's not her or Cas who has a problem with clowns. The burgers aren't great but the onion rings are. A woman across the aisle from them asks if they know when the flea market a few miles back is going to open again. Deanna shakes her head and asks if the woman's ever been to Paul Bunyan Land. The woman laughs and says, "That's actually a thing?" and says she's not from around here.

The woman's husband or boyfriend or friend sits down with their ice cream sundaes and sounds theatrically Minnesota when he says, "Oh, yeah, they've got a mystery spot and everything," and rolls his eyes and laughs.

Deanna can barely choke down the bite of burger that's in her mouth and the rest of it feels like it's about to come back up. She has to remind herself that the last mystery spot didn't turn out to have anything to do with the case. She wonders if Cas knows about that, read it in her DNA somehow, or if Gabriel told him. She remembers the burnt imprint of wings on that hotel floor and it's not Gabriel she's picturing in the middle of it. She pulls Cas out the door and chugs half the bottle of pepto that's in the Impala's glove compartment. Cas asks if she's all right. She doesn't say anything until they're five miles down the road and her guts are churning a little less, and then she still gives Cas the story in as few words as possible.

"I regret Gabriel's death," Castiel says to the white line outside the passenger window.

"Yeah, well." Gabriel was a douchebag, but he helped in the end. That counts for more at some times than others.

*

They rent a cabin at the Twin Pines Resort, and Cas actually gets it when Deanna makes a _Back to the Future_ crack. The guy behind the check-in desk isn't impressed. Deanna smiles pretty at him and says, "I bet that's only the five hundredth time you heard that, huh?" and he's more impressed, and a little too hopeful when he's asking if they want the cabin with one queen bed and a sleeper sofa or the one with two separate bedrooms. She figures there's no point spending the extra money, even if it isn't technically her money.

"I didn't like him," Cas says when they're out of earshot and rolling down the gravel road to what turns out to be a shoebox of a cabin, but it looks cleaner than a lot of places she's stayed.

"'Cause he was giving off kidnapper vibes or 'cause he was hitting on me?"

"I didn't sense any 'vibes.'"

"Air quotes, Cas." That he probably can't just tell anymore when someone's not human goes unspoken.

"Lindsey Buckingham?" he says when they're inside and Deanna's boots are off and she's handed him his newest FBI ID.

"Your punishment for actually liking Fleetwood Mac. Damned if I'm being Stevie Nicks, though. I hit the shower, you hit the internet?" She's almost got her hand out for paper-rock-scissors before she remembers that Cas will just go with it, other than asking who Stevie Nicks is.

The fact that the shower's a clear glass cubicle doesn't occur to her when she doesn't shut the bathroom door all the way, not until she keeps having to shout 'what?' at the information Cas is telling her about and he's suddenly about two feet from her on the other side of the glass and she slips and almost faceplants through it. " _Dammit_ , Cas. One of these days I'm sitting your ass down and making you watch _Psycho._ Also, naked? Privacy?"

"My apologies. The children who disappeared last week each have one grandparent who investigated the 1980 disappearances."

"Hang on, so the cops investigate some missing kids, and then thirty years later their grandkids go missing the same way? What about the other ones?"

"We'll need to research it further."

"So, um, maybe do that?" She's done stuff less dignified in front of people in general and Cas in particular than wash her crotch, yeah, but, "I'm getting a little uncomfortable here."

"Sorry."

The grandparents are a dead end, literally, other than McKenzie Jefferson's distraught mother managing to cough up a hazy memory of hearing about a cousin whose body was never found. She calls Cas to check the records and pats Mrs. Jefferson's hand and gives her tissues and tries not to make empty promises about getting her kid back safe, because she knows it's not going to happen.

Deanna goes through the girl's bedroom, where there's no hex bags or spellbooks or anything hinky at all, and only realizes she's clutching white-knuckled onto a copy of _My Brother Sam Is Dead_ when Mrs. Jefferson sniffles from the doorway, "It was one of her summer reading books. She was so excited about going to middle school," and snaps her out of it. _Was_ means she's given up.

Jesse Lund's house has an old-as-dirt tintype of a bearded man in a sheriff's badge, and a father who says there's always been cops in the family. "Cops and Marines," he says.

"Semper Fi," Deanna says like a kick in the knee and takes the tintype as evidence.

*

There's take-out from the restaurant down the road where they proudly advertise they're now serving dinner, and nothing to drink except what was already in the car because it's fucking Sunday in fucking Minnesota and she really wishes she'd remembered that before they left South Dakota. Deanna's balancing on the lumpy sofa pasting all Cas's research up on the wall to try to make some kind of sense of it, but it just looks like a giant clusterfuck. Her head hurts and the new Fed shoes gave her a blister and her sandwich is soggy. They can go to the amusement park and the county records office tomorrow (or break in later tonight) but she has a feeling there's not going to be a grave to burn at the end of it. Jesse and MacKenzie didn't even know each other, and neither did their families beyond the grandfathers-- they were just in the park on the same day and both rode the haunted mine elevator.

If the mine elevator were actually haunted, that would be one thing, but it wasn't there when the oldest disappearances happened. The only thing connected in any of it is everyone who disappeared having some relative who worked another disappearance case. "This case blows," she says, letting her legs drop out from under her so she bounces down onto the sofa.

"It could be a vengeful spirit targeting members of law enforcement for failing to find a missing child," Cas says. He makes a face at a sip of his lukewarm beer and pushes it away.

"You found anything like that?"

"Not yet."

"You should change out of that stuff. I'm not ironing it."

Cas looks down at himself, loose tie and rolled-up shirt sleeves. "I wouldn't have thought you would," he says, which would look and sound polite and mild to most people, but it's actually that dry snark of his that makes his eyes crease at the corners, actually translates to 'as if you'd iron anything.'

"Asshole."

Cas unbuttons his shirt and his hand reaches up to where the tattoo is, but he stops short before she has to tell him not to scratch, and scowls at it instead. It's healing a little faster than a normal person's might, but not by much.

She can't decide if she should bitch about her headache and blisters or not.

She hears Sam calling to her in her sleep again and feels his corpse-cold hands grasping at her. They aren't Sam's; Cas is there when she opens her eyes, his hands cold from the cranked-up air conditioning. "Was I snoring again?" she tries, but her voice trembles. Cas just stares down at her and one of his thumbs is tracing a slow circle on the base of her neck. "Fuck this," she mutters, squirms out from under him and splashes water on her face in the bathroom and tries to keep herself from screaming or punching the mirror.

Cas is back on the bed when she comes out, just sitting on the edge with his hands folded.

"I'd know, wouldn't I?" she says, wondering if he can see her crazed bloodshot eyes in the dark like this. "I'd know if it was really him and not just some fucking dream? I always knew the difference when you did it."

"Sam's gone, Deanna."

"I'd go back down there for seven hundred more years if it'd get him out. I mean, fuck, what am I good for now that the destiny shtick's over if I can't save his ass?"

"Saving other asses. Mine."

"I think I more like doomed your ass." She sits down next to him, feels the wiry hairs on his legs brush against her skin and the scratch of the bedspread underneath her.

"If I chose again, I would make the same choice."

"Why?" Her voice is almost lost in the hum of the air conditioner kicking back on.

"Because you believe I'm worth saving," he says, and she almost laughs. She does smile, sort of, and so does he.

*

"Nice trenchcoat," says the giant animatronic Paul Bunyan statue. "Are you an international super-spy?"

"I'm an FBI agent," Cas says to it, holding up his badge as though the guy inside can see that far and Deanna winces as a few heads turn.

"Well, kids, it's my naptime," the statue says. "Don't worry if the ground starts shaking, 'cause it's just me snoring." A couple of little kids laugh and the creepily blinking eyelids go closed. Then a guy comes out of a door by the base of the statue's chair.

"I guess you know why we're here," Deanna says. "I'm Agent Ford, and this is Agent Buckingham."

"Jake Larsen. You mind if we talk in the dining hall? I only get a half hour lunch break."

Cas doesn't realize the maybe-all-of-sixteen-year-old girl behind the concession counter is practically swooning over him, even when she gives him a comically large souvenir cup (comically large seems to be a theme around here, even stuff that doesn't make sense, like shopping carts and pencils) and cotton candy for free, which he eats like a science experiment while Jake's telling them he's sure he saw the kids leave the park, but neither his boss nor the sheriff seem to believe him. "So I have a little drinking problem," Jake says with a shrug. "But I know what I saw."

"Did you see who they left with?"

"I figured it was their family, but when the parents came back looking later, it wasn't the same people. Some older guy in a hat and sunglasses, and a woman with a stroller."

Cas brings up a pile of faces from photocopied newspaper clippings, but Jake doesn't recognize anyone.

"So, off the record," Deanna says, "how many times a day do you get people flipping you off while you're up in the lumberjack head?"

Jake laughs. "Now and then. Mostly the kids who work here."

Cas stands up abruptly. "Excuse me," he says when he's already two feet away from the table.

"Did that guy watch too much Columbo or something?" Jake says with a grin. It's maybe supposed to be flirty or charming but it kind of just makes her teeth itch.

" _That guy_ 's saved a lot of people, Larsen," she snaps, and it's worth it to see him stumble to backpedal his way through an apology, and anyway, she meant it.

She leans against the wall outside the men's room until Cas comes out, and hey, at least he doesn't try not to look her in the eye. "My tongue is blue," he says with the same air of disgusted inconvenience he assigns to things like shaving and underwear shopping and she smiles and shakes her head and thinks about the last time she said _don't ever change._

All she says is, "C'mon, Columbo. We got a tourist trap to search."

None of the attractions, haunted or otherwise, have anything suspicious, but they are fucking hilarious with Cas along to be baffled by them. "Why would anyone find this frightening?" he asks in the asylum. "The downward motion is obviously an illusion," he says in the haunted mine.

"It's for little kids, Cas," she says, but even she can't explain a random fake outhouse or the dinosaur statues, and she's kind of glad he's being all Professor Logic when his commentary gets her through the mystery spot without wanting to repeatedly put her sensible heel through its cheap partition walls. All the little buildings are hot and stuffy and attic-smelling, everything a little run-down, a graveyard of rusting old rides over the fence behind the inexplicable dinosaur statues.

There's another part to the park, out the back past the giant pumpkin and shopping cart sculptures, a 'pioneer village' that more than anything is like a whole bunch of antique stores where nothing's actually for sale. Some of them are set up like old-timey banks or drugstores or whatever, but some of them just look like somebody needs to call _Hoarders._ But it's not Deanna's problem why somebody wants to keep a collection of rusty tractors and gas pumps the size of a football field. One of the little houses with its windows papered over and a yellowing sign that says it's closed for renovation, though, that's Deanna's problem. So are the symbols drawn on the floor.

Cas squints at them, tilts his head one way and then the other. "These symbols, they're...." He shakes his head. She can see his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

"Bad mojo, huh?"

"They must be. But I don't know them."

Hell. "I guess we better get some pictures to Bobby."

"You don't understand. I _should_ know them. I used to know them. I know I used to know them."

She might laugh at the constipated look on his face if she didn't have the feeling that this isn't like seeing some bit-part character on TV and going 'where do I know that guy from?' or not being able to remember that German word for laughing at other people's pain. A voice in her head that sounds like Sam supplies _schadenfreude_ , because he's the one who taught it to her, but she's still not laughing.

"Cas, it's okay," she says.

"Of course it isn't," Cas says, and doesn't say another word until they're back at the cabin.

*

The disappearing kids are being sacrificed to a cult, one that worships a demon that must have gotten wiped out in the apocalypse, maybe even before, because it sure as hell isn't keeping up its end of the bargain anymore. Other than for fishing and camping and the occasional Coen Brothers fan coming to check out a fence, Brainerd's been on a steady decline for decades. Deanna calls the real Feds about the sheriff. Jake misuses the business card Deanna gave him to invite her to karaoke night at the VFW.

"Could be fun," she says to Cas, but he doesn't seem to think so. Hell, she doesn't even really think so, but Cas has been brooding since he couldn't read the sigils, and if it takes getting him shitfaced and sitting through three hours of Journey's greatest hits being vocally violated to snap him out of it, then fine. She's pissed enough, more for him than at him, but just fed the fuck up and _tired_ enough, to shout at him to get the fuck over himself already, because it's not like he's the only one who's got issues.

That gets her a creaky screen door bouncing shut and the sound of Cas's boots disappearing into the distance. She kicks the bed a few times and swears herself half hoarse and possibly breaks her pinky toe in the process.

Two hours, some ice, some tape, and a drive to the nearest liquor store (which is not very near) later, Cas isn't back. Deanna takes the bottle of Jack with her and follows the path down to the lake. She could be badass and track where he's gone, but the truth is that she doesn't need to.

Cas is sitting at the end of a boat landing, leaning over and trailing his hand through the water. She'd been gearing up what to say when she left the cabin, but between the time to cool off and her toe throbbing against the side of her boot, she's sort of been losing hold on the fighting words, and Cas looks like a familiar dreamscape, so instead she says, "I feel like I should be sleep-fishing." The sun's setting but the lake isn't empty and calm-- there are some kids on jet skis, whooping in the distance, and there's a garishly painted sailboat named 'Uff Da' just a few feet away, but still.

Cas doesn't look away from the water when she settles next to him, but he takes the whiskey when she passes it. "I'm completely powerless."

She almost says 'welcome to the club.' "Hey, I never had superpowers and I still saved the world a few times."

"You had a destiny, Deanna."

"Yeah, well, if you're going with that argument, look where that got me. Way I see it, we're kinda in the same boat. I skirted being an angel condom and got a dead brother out of the deal. You kicked the End of Days in the ass and got booted out of the fraternity." She watches Cas's lips wrap around the mouth of the bottle.

"Heaven could be moments away from crashing down around our ears, and I can do _nothing._ Raphael could be--"

"It was going to shit up there my whole life and I had no idea. I thought you were okay with the choice thing." She takes the bottle back.

"With the choice itself. The consequences are unpleasant. Quite aside from the new... physical constraints, you must know that my inability to read those sigils was only the beginning. I'll lose more. Forget more. I'll be of very little use here once it's all gone."

"So write it down before you forget. And two, bullshit. You've gotten to be a hell of a shot and you can kick some serious ass. And save some serious ass. What happened to that? It's good enough for me but it's not good enough for you?"

Cas doesn't answer, but he stops staring so far out over the lake, and follows suit when Deanna pulls off her boots and socks and rolls up her jeans to dangle her feet in the water. His hand covers hers on the neck of the whiskey bottle, but she doesn't give it back and he doesn't try to take it. A teenager turns his jet ski over and comes up laughing and the sun slips the rest of the way down. The walk back is cold damp feet and Cas's hand warm in hers.

The sofa bed stays folded up when they get back and eat instant mac'n'cheese and don't actually drink much more while someone on TV has to cook with goat brains. Deanna thinks this is one of those things that should probably get talked about, but instead she looks at Cas across the pillows and listens to his breathing speed up when their toes brush together under the covers and they don't talk about it at all, other than for her to say, "Cas?"

And for him to say, "Yes," and for them to reach for each other. She thinks she'll have to go slowly, gently, show him what to do, but that one yes is all it takes to have him kissing her and stripping her and grasping at her like he's been starving for it.

"Hey, hey, slow down," she tells him, and learns that her fingernails on his back make him shiver and sigh, wonders if she's touching a memory of wings or just skin. "We got all night," she says, lips scraping wet against the stubble on his jaw. He kisses the mark on her shoulder, traces the indents of scar tissue with his tongue. She's always thought it might fade with time, but it never has, not even now that he's close enough to human for his skin just to be a normal kind of sweat-hot, for her to know that the strength of his hands gripping her ass is thoughtless and not him pulling punches, that he can neither snap her bones nor heal them.

"Dee--" he says, and she kisses the last syllable and whatever else out of his mouth, and he comes too soon, sudden and wet against the join of her thigh and hip, biting down on a gasp that sucks the air from her throat and it's stupidly, insanely hot, especially when there's none of that half-shamed half-betrayed 'fuck this humanity shit' look on his face where he glares like he's hoping to smite something. Just soft eyelashes and his mouth kissed red and his fingers caught in a snarl in her hair.

"Don't think you're getting off that easy," Deanna says, and then laughs at herself. "No pun intended."

Cas smiles, loose and easy, and pulls her on top of him. "You're occasionally very ridiculous," he says, and his fingers draw a meandering spiral over her breast, through the few little dark hairs that like to crop up from time to time, and she watches him watch his hand circle and close and tease.

"Part of my charm," she says, and bites her lip as the beginning of a trigger callus on his right hand catches rough against her nipple, spreads her knees down wider so she can feel him against her.

She knows he loves her. He tells her anyway. In return she doesn't tell him not to say it or accuse him of having some kind of fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome or mention the very real possibility that this will all end in tears. Most things do. And this doesn't really change anything about them; it was probably inevitable, and maybe he's been not-thinking about it as much as she has. If that didn't occur to her now, it would have occurred to her in the morning, after her dreams have been silent and she wakes up knowing exactly where she is and who she's with and why.

*

They go back to the park as paying guests on their way out of town because Cas has never ridden a tilt-a-whirl, and swears he never will again, but he likes the ferris wheel. She's trying to convince Cas to get his picture taken with Babe the Blue Ox when a call from Bobby kicks them back onto the road, toward Easter, Pennsylvania and something that sounds too much like biblical plagues.

Deanna will talk the whole way through Illinois about how much she hates driving through Illinois, and Cas won't suggest any detours in Indiana. They'll argue for most of Ohio about why Cas didn't think it was worth mentioning that a bunch of holy nukes have been missing this whole time, but Deanna will decide it's not worth it anymore around Youngstown, because she knows probably even going back in time wouldn't change anything. Near Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, Deanna will ask a motel clerk for a king, and laugh her ass off at signing in as J. & J. Cash, even though Cas doesn't get the joke. Heaven will still be hanging over them and Hell will still be growling under them and they'll keep driving in between.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Queen of Nothing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/760012) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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